Analysis Of Into The Wild, By Jon Krakauer

The novel, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer introduces a young adult by the name of Chris McCandless who is on a quest for his self-identity. Chris doesn’t necessarily have an itinerary planned for this adventure of his. He just goes with the flow and doesn’t worry about the next event in his life. He abandoned his family, his friends and his life, for what reason? That is the essential question. One might question the normality of this kid but I for one feel that he was completely normal but confused. He is all over the place. His adventure stretches from Carthage, SD to the Stampede Trail in Alaska where his journey sadly ends. Why is Krakauer writing this story of this lost boy who has no plan in life? I’ve constantly been asking myself the

He wanted to see the world and grab it by the horns. A passage from Leo Tolstoy says, “I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence”(15). This is Chris’s life in a nutshell. He never was happy in one place during his life whether it is college or his family, it was all the same. I firmly believe that he would’ve stayed in South Dakota if wasn’t for the arrest of Westerberg. He found a family in Carthage and was more than happy. In my opinion Chris was just searching for a new family and place he could call home and when he lost that after leaving Carthage, he lost touch with society and forgot the reason why he was on this journey. Westerberg says, “Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things”(18). Chris always overthinks society throughout the course of this story. He’s on this trip to become one with nature and to be at peace. He never truly has a plan. I compare him to Holden Caulfield of “The Catcher In the Rye”. Holden had no course of action and he also goes with the flow. They both have a complex outlook on society. Chris sees a canoe and decides to paddle through Mexico. He neither has a plan nor an itinerary. The only place he plans to attend is the wild bush of Alaska and we all know

Both Chris and Franz are personally changed during their short time together. I too have been influenced greatly by someone in my life. Krakauer wrote, “A disciplined, self-reliant man, he got along remarkably well despite his age and solitude. When McCandless came into his world, however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses”(55). Chris never felt as strong about Franz but Franz loved having Chris around. Franz never really felt the effect of a life without his wife and kid until he met Chris. Chris has never really had that father-son relationship and that’s what I believe he was searching for during the course of his trip. I think he found a mother in Jan Burress even though he hated when she acted like that and he found a friend in Wayne Westerberg. It never really makes sense to me what Chris is searching for on this trip. When I was 15 years old I shared an experience like this. I had to help out at a homeless shelter on Halloween. I obviously wanted no part of this and I thought that it made no sense for me to be at a shelter when I could be getting ready for one of my favorite nights of the year. Once I got there I was quickly taken back at the way these people lived. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were hundreds of people standing in line for one bowl of soup. I was being so selfish when all of these people didn’t have a